Author name: Kelly Newman

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Some parts of Trump’s proposed budget for NASA are literally draconian

darpa, DRACO, NASA, nasa budget, nuclear thermal propulsion, Science, Space, White House / /

“That’s exactly the kind of thing that NASA should be concentrating its resources on.”

Artist’s illustration of the DRACO nuclear rocket engine in space. Credit: Lockheed Martin

New details of the Trump administration’s plans for NASA, released Friday, revealed the White House’s desire to end the development of an experimental nuclear thermal rocket engine that could have shown a new way of exploring the Solar System.

Trump’s NASA budget request is rife with spending cuts. Overall, the White House proposes reducing NASA’s budget by about 24 percent, from $24.8 billion this year to $18.8 billion in fiscal year 2026. In previous stories, Ars has covered many of the programs impacted by the proposed cuts, which would cancel the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft and terminate numerous robotic science missions, including the Mars Sample Return, probes to Venus, and future space telescopes.

Instead, the leftover funding for NASA’s human exploration program would go toward supporting commercial projects to land on the Moon and Mars.

NASA’s initiatives to pioneer next-generation space technologies are also hit hard in the White House’s budget proposal. If the Trump administration gets its way, NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, or STMD, will see its budget cut nearly in half, from $1.1 billion to $568 million.

Trump’s budget request isn’t final. Both Republican-controlled houses of Congress will write their own versions of the NASA budget, which must be reconciled before going to the White House for President Trump’s signature.

“The budget reduces Space Technology by approximately half, including eliminating failing space propulsion projects,” the White House wrote in an initial overview of the NASA budget request released May 2. “The reductions also scale back or eliminate technology projects that are not needed by NASA or are better suited to private sector research and development.”

Breathing fire

Last week, the White House and NASA put a finer point on these “failing space propulsion projects.”

“This budget provides no funding for Nuclear Thermal Propulsion and Nuclear Electric Propulsion projects,” officials wrote in a technical supplement released Friday detailing Trump’s NASA budget proposal. “These efforts are costly investments, would take many years to develop, and have not been identified as the propulsion mode for deep space missions. The nuclear propulsion projects are terminated to achieve cost savings and because there are other nearer-term propulsion alternatives for Mars transit.”

Foremost among these cuts, the White House proposes to end NASA’s participation in the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO) project. NASA said this proposal “reflects the decision by our partner to cancel” the DRACO mission, which would have demonstrated a nuclear thermal rocket engine in space for the first time.

NASA’s partner on the DRACO mission was the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, the Pentagon’s research and development arm. A DARPA spokesperson confirmed the agency was closing out the project.

“DARPA has completed the agency’s involvement in the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Orbit (DRACO) program and is transitioning its knowledge to our DRACO mission partner, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and to other potential DOD programs,” the spokesperson said in a response to written questions.

A nuclear rocket engine, which was to be part of NASA’s aborted NERVA program, is tested at Jackass Flats, Nevada, in 1967. Credit: Corbis via Getty Images)

Less than two years ago, NASA and DARPA announced plans to move forward with the roughly $500 million DRACO project, targeting a launch into Earth orbit aboard a traditional chemical rocket in 2027. “With the help of this new technology, astronauts could journey to and from deep space faster than ever, a major capability to prepare for crewed missions to Mars,” former NASA administrator Bill Nelson said at the time.

The DRACO mission would have consisted of several elements, including a nuclear reactor to rapidly heat up super-cold liquid hydrogen fuel stored in an insulated tank onboard the spacecraft. Temperatures inside the engine would reach nearly 5,000° Fahrenheit, boiling the hydrogen and driving the resulting gas through a nozzle, generating thrust. From the outside, the spacecraft’s design looks a lot like the upper stage of a traditional rocket. However, theoretically, a nuclear thermal rocket engine like DRACO’s would offer twice the efficiency of the highest-performing conventional rocket engines. That translates to significantly less fuel that a mission to Mars would have to carry across the Solar System.

Essentially, a nuclear thermal rocket engine combines the high-thrust capability of a chemical engine with some of the fuel efficiency benefits of low-thrust solar-electric engines. With DRACO, engineers sought hard data to verify their understanding of nuclear propulsion and wanted to make sure the nuclear engine’s challenging design actually worked. DRACO would have used high-assay low-enriched uranium to power its nuclear reactor.

Nuclear electric propulsion uses an onboard nuclear reactor to power plasma thrusters that create thrust by accelerating an ionized gas, like xenon, through a magnetic field. Nuclear electric propulsion would provide another leap in engine efficiency beyond the capabilities of a system like DRACO and may ultimately offer the most attractive option for enduring deep space transportation.

NASA led the development of DRACO’s nuclear rocket engine, while DARPA was responsible for the overall spacecraft design, operations, and the thorny problem of securing regulatory approval to launch a nuclear reactor into orbit. The reactor on DRACO would have launched in “cold” mode before activating in space, reducing the risk to people on the ground in the event of a launch accident. The Space Force agreed to pay for DRACO’s launch on a United Launch Alliance Vulcan rocket.

DARPA and NASA selected Lockheed Martin as the lead contractor for the DRACO spacecraft in 2023. BWX Technologies, a leader in the US nuclear industry, won the contract to develop the mission’s reactor.

“We received the notice from DARPA that it ended the DRACO program,” a Lockheed Martin spokesperson said. “While we’re disappointed with the decision, it doesn’t change our vision of how nuclear power influences how we will explore and operate in the vastness of space.”

Mired in the lab

More than 60 years have passed since a US-built nuclear reactor launched into orbit. Aviation Week reported in January that one problem facing DRACO engineers involved questions about how to safely test the nuclear thermal engine on the ground while adhering to nuclear safety protocols.

“We’re bringing two things together—space mission assurance and nuclear safety—and there’s a fair amount of complexity,” said Matthew Sambora, a DRACO program manager at DARPA, in an interview with Aviation Week. At the time, DARPA and NASA had already given up on a 2027 launch to concentrate on developing a prototype engine using helium as a propellant before moving on to an operational engine with more energetic liquid hydrogen fuel, Aviation Week reported.

Greg Meholic, an engineer at the Aerospace Corporation, highlighted the shortfall in ground testing capability in a presentation last year. Nuclear thermal propulsion testing “requires that engine exhaust be scrubbed of radiologics before being released,” he wrote. This requirement “could result in substantially large, prohibitively expensive facilities that take years to build and qualify.”

These safety protocols weren’t as stringent when NASA and the Air Force first pursued nuclear propulsion in the 1960s. Now, the first serious 21st-century effort to fly a nuclear rocket engine in space is grinding to a halt.

“Given that our near-term human exploration and science needs do not require nuclear propulsion, current demonstration projects will end,” wrote Janet Petro, NASA’s acting administrator, in a letter accompanying the Trump administration’s budget release last week.

This figure illustrates the major elements of a typical nuclear thermal rocket engine. Credit: NASA/Glenn Research Center

NASA’s 2024 budget allocated $117 million for nuclear propulsion work, an increase from $91 million the previous year. Congress added more funding for NASA’s nuclear propulsion programs over the Biden administration’s proposed budget in recent years, signaling support on Capitol Hill that may save at least some nuclear propulsion initiatives next year.

It’s true that nuclear propulsion isn’t required for any NASA missions currently on the books. Today’s rockets are good at hurling cargo and people off planet Earth, but once a spacecraft arrives in orbit, there are several ways to propel it toward more distant destinations.

NASA’s existing architecture for sending astronauts to the Moon uses the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft, both of which are proposed for cancellation and look a lot like the vehicles NASA used to fly astronauts to the Moon more than 50 years ago. SpaceX’s reusable Starship, designed with an eye toward settling Mars, uses conventional chemical propulsion, with methane and liquid oxygen propellants that SpaceX one day hopes to generate on the surface of the Red Planet.

So NASA, SpaceX, and other companies don’t need nuclear propulsion to beat China back to the Moon or put the first human footprints on Mars. But there’s a broad consensus that in the long run, nuclear rockets offer a better way of moving around the Solar System.

The military’s motive for funding nuclear thermal propulsion was its potential for becoming a more efficient means of maneuvering around the Earth. Many of the military’s most important spacecraft are limited by fuel, and the Space Force is investigating orbital refueling and novel propulsion methods to extend the lifespan of satellites.

NASA’s nuclear power program is not finished. The Trump administration’s budget proposal calls for continued funding for the agency’s fission surface power program, with the goal of fielding a nuclear reactor that could power a base on the surface of the Moon or Mars. Lockheed and BWXT, the contractors involved in the DRACO mission, are part of the fission surface power program.

There is some funding in the White House’s budget request for tech demos using other methods of in-space propulsion. NASA would continue funding experiments in long-term storage and transfer of cryogenic propellants like liquid methane, liquid hydrogen, and liquid oxygen. These joint projects between NASA and industry could pave the way for orbital refueling and orbiting propellant depots, aligning with the direction of companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, and United Launch Alliance.

But many scientists and engineers believe nuclear propulsion offers the only realistic path for a sustainable campaign ferrying people between the Earth and Mars. A report commissioned by NASA and the National Academies concluded in 2021 that an aggressive tech-development program could advance nuclear thermal propulsion enough for a human expedition to Mars in 2039. The prospects for nuclear electric propulsion were murkier.

This would have required NASA to substantially increase its budget for nuclear propulsion immediately, likely by an order of magnitude beyond the agency’s baseline funding level, or to an amount exceeding $1 billion per year, said Bobby Braun, co-chair of the National Academies report, in a 2021 interview with Ars. That didn’t happen.

Going nuclear

The interplanetary transportation architectures envisioned by NASA and SpaceX will, at least initially, primarily use chemical propulsion for the cruise between Earth and Mars.

Kurt Polzin, chief engineer of NASA’s space nuclear propulsion projects, said significant technical hurdles stand in the way of any propulsion system selected to power heavy cargo and humans to Mars.

“Anybody who says that they’ve solved the problem, you don’t know that because you don’t have enough data,” Polzin said last week at the Humans to the Moon and Mars Summit in Washington.

“We know that to do a Mars mission with a Starship, you need lots of refuelings at Earth, you need lots of refuelings at Mars, which you have to send in advance,” Polzin said. “You either need to send that propellant in advance or send a bunch of material and hardware to the surface to be set up and robotically make your propellant in situ while you’re there.”

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is betting on chemical propulsion for round-trip flights to Mars with its Starship rocket. This will require assembly of propellant-generation plants on the Martian surface. Credit: SpaceX

Last week, SpaceX founder Elon Musk outlined how the company plans to land its first Starships on Mars. His roadmap includes more than 100 cargo flights to deliver equipment to produce methane and liquid oxygen propellants on the surface of Mars. This is necessary for any Starship to launch off the Red Planet and return to Earth.

“You can start to see that this starts to become a Rube Goldberg way to do Mars,” Polzin said. “Will I say it can’t work? No, but will I say that it’s really, really difficult and challenging. Are there a lot of miracles to make it work? Absolutely. So the notion that SpaceX has solved Mars or is going to do Mars with Starship, I would challenge that on its face. I don’t think the analysis and the data bear that out.”

Engineers know how methane-fueled rocket engines perform in space. Scientists have created liquid oxygen and liquid methane since the late 1800s. Scaling up a propellant plant on Mars to produce thousands of tons of cryogenic liquids is another matter. In the long run, this might be a suitable solution for Musk’s vision of creating a city on Mars, but it comes with immense startup costs and risks. Still, nuclear propulsion is an entirely untested technology as well.

“The thing with nuclear is there are challenges to making it work, too,” Polzin said. “However, all of my challenges get solved here at Earth and in low-Earth orbit before I leave. Nuclear is nice. It has a higher specific impulse, especially when we’re talking about nuclear thermal propulsion. It has high thrust, which means it will get our astronauts there and back quickly, but I can carry all the fuel I need to get back with me, so I don’t need to do any complicated refueling at Mars. I can return without having to make propellant or send any pre-positioned propellant to get back.”

The tug of war over nuclear propulsion is nothing new. The Air Force started a program to develop reactors for nuclear thermal rockets at the height of the Cold War. NASA took over the Air Force’s role a few years later, and the project proceeded into the next phase, called the Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application (NERVA). President Richard Nixon ultimately canceled the NERVA project in 1973 after the government had spent $1.4 billion on it, equivalent to about $10 billion in today’s dollars. Despite nearly two decades of work, NERVA never flew in space.

Doing the hard things

The Pentagon and NASA studied several more nuclear thermal and nuclear electric propulsion initiatives before DRACO. Today, there’s a nascent commercial business case for compact nuclear reactors beyond just the government. But there’s scant commercial interest in mounting a full-scale nuclear propulsion demonstration solely with private funding.

Fred Kennedy, co-founder and CEO of a space nuclear power company called Dark Fission, said most venture capital investors lack the appetite to wait for financial returns in nuclear propulsion that they may see in 15 or 20 years.

“It’s a truism: Space is hard,” said Kennedy, a former DARPA program manager. “Nuclear turns out to be hard for reasons we can all understand. So space-nuclear is hard-squared, folks. As a result, you give this to your average associate at a VC firm and they get scared quick. They see the moles all over your face, and they run away screaming.”

But commercial launch costs are coming down. With sustained government investment and streamlined regulations, “this is the best chance we’ve had in a long time” to get a nuclear propulsion system into space, Kennedy said.

Technicians prepare a nozzle for a prototype nuclear thermal rocket engine in 1964. Credit: NASA

“I think, right now, we’re in this transitional period where companies like mine are going have to rely on some government largesse, as well as hopefully both commercial partnerships and honest private investment,” Kennedy said. “Three years ago, I would have told you I thought I could have done the whole thing with private investment, but three years have turned my hair white.”

Those who share Kennedy’s view thought they were getting an ally in the Trump administration. Jared Isaacman, the billionaire commercial astronaut Trump nominated to become the next NASA administrator, promised to prioritize nuclear propulsion in his tenure as head of the nation’s space agency.

During his Senate confirmation hearing in April, Isaacman said NASA should turn over management of heavy-lift rockets, human-rated spacecraft, and other projects to commercial industry. This change, he said, would allow NASA to focus on the “near-impossible challenges that no company, organization, or agency anywhere in the world would be able to undertake.”

The example Isaacman gave in his confirmation hearing was nuclear propulsion. “That’s something that no company would ever embark upon,” he told lawmakers. “There is no obvious economic return. There are regulatory challenges. That’s exactly the kind of thing that NASA should be concentrating its resources on.”

But the White House suddenly announced on Saturday that it was withdrawing Isaacman’s nomination days before the Senate was expected to confirm him for the NASA post. While there’s no indication that Trump’s withdrawal of Isaacman had anything to do with any specific part of the White House’s funding plan, his removal leaves NASA without an advocate for nuclear propulsion and a number of other projects falling under the White House’s budget ax.

Photo of Stephen Clark

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

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11 things you probably didn’t know the Switch 2 can do

gaming / /

Our first quick dive into the system-level settings and the new GameChat multiplayer.

Let’s-a go! Credit: Kyle Orland

Eight years ago, just before the release of the Nintendo Switch, we provided an in-depth review of the hardware thanks to early production units provided by Nintendo. This year, Nintendo has opted not to provide such unrestricted early press access to the Switch 2 hardware, citing a “day-one update” to the system software and some launch games that would supposedly make pre-release evaluation more difficult.

As such, we won’t be able to provide our full thoughts on the Switch 2 until well after the system is in players’ hands. While that’s not an ideal situation for readers looking to make an early purchase decision, we’ll do our best to give you our hands-on impressions as soon as possible after launch day.

In lieu of review access, though, we were able to get some extended hands-on time with the final Switch 2 hardware at a daylong preview event held by Nintendo last week. This event provided our first look at the console’s system-level menu and settings, as well as features like GameChat (which was hard to fully evaluate in an extremely controlled environment).

While this access was far from sufficient for a full review, it did let us discover a few interesting features that we weren’t aware of beforehand. Here are some of the new tidbits we stumbled across during our day with the Switch 2 hardware.

GameChat can generate captions for live speech

One of the most unexpected accessibility features of the Switch 2 is the system’s ability to automatically generate on-screen captions for what friends are saying during a GameChat session. These captions appear in their own box that can be set to the side of the main gameplay. The captioning system seemed pretty fast and accurate in our test and could even update captions from multiple speakers at the same time.

GameChat can automatically update captions for multiple speakers at once.

Credit: Kyle Orland

GameChat can automatically update captions for multiple speakers at once. Credit: Kyle Orland

While this is obviously useful for hard-of-hearing players, we could also see the feature being a boon for managing crosstalk among rowdy GameChat parties or for quickly referring back to something someone said a few seconds ago.

You can generate spoken speech from text messages

In a reverse of the auto-captioning system discussed above, GameChat also has a feature buried deep in its menus that lets you type a message on the on-screen keyboard and have it spoken aloud to the other participants in a slightly robotic voice. This could come in handy when you’re playing in an environment where you have to be quiet but still want to quickly convey detailed information to your fellow players.

The camera has built-in head-tracking

During GameChat sessions, you can make the connected camera show only your face instead of your entire body and/or the background behind it. This mode keeps your face centered in a small, circular frame even as you move around during gameplay, though there is a slight delay in the tracking if you move your head too quickly.

While you can also activate a similar face display during local multiplayer sessions of Mario Kart World, the game doesn’t seem to track your movements, meaning you can easily fall out of frame if you don’t hold your body still.

The system can detect the angle of the kickstand

Wonderful!

Wonderful!

This was a cute little surprise I discovered in a Switch 2 Welcome Tour mini-game that asks you to set the kickstand as close as possible to a given angle. This mini-game works even if the Joy-Cons are not attached, suggesting that there is a sensor in the kickstand or tablet itself that measures the angle. It did take a few seconds of stillness for the game to fully confirm the system’s resting angle, though, so don’t expect to be tilting the kickstand rapidly to control action games or anything.

You can use mouse mode to navigate system menus

I stumbled on this feature when I was holding the Joy-Cons normally and one of my fingers accidentally passed over the mouse sensor, activating a mouse pointer on the system menu screen. When I put the controller down on its edge, I found that the pointer could scroll and click through those menus, often much more quickly than flicking a joystick.

Mouse mode also lets you zoom in on specific areas of the screen with a quick double-click, which should be useful for both vision-impaired players and those playing on tiny and/or far-off screens.

You can adjust the mouse mode sensitivity

The system menu lets you adjust the mouse sensor’s sensitivity between “low,” “medium,” and “high.” While that’s a lot less precise than the fully adjustable DPI settings you might be used to with a computer mouse, it’s still a welcome option.

In some quick testing, I found the high-sensitivity mode to be especially useful when using the mouse on a small surface, such as the top of my thigh. At this setting, the pointer could move from one end of the screen to the other with the slightest wrist adjustment. Low sensitivity mode, on the other hand, proved useful in more precise situations, such as in a Welcome Tour mini-game where I had to move a ball quickly and precisely through a large, electrified maze.

You can play sounds to find lost controllers

Find lost controllers easily with this menu option.

Find lost controllers easily with this menu option.

Lose a Joy-Con somewhere in the depths of your couch? Not to worry—a new menu option on the Switch 2 lets you play a distinctive sound through that Joy-Con’s improved HD Rumble 2 motor to help you find its precise location. While we confirmed that this feature also works with the new Pro Controller 2, we were unable to determine whether it can be used for original Switch controllers that are synced with a Switch 2.

You can set a system-wide security PIN

Your unique PIN code must be entered any time the system comes out of sleep mode, making the hardware functionally useless to anyone who doesn’t have the PIN. This should be great for kids who want to keep siblings away and parents who are worried about their kids sneaking in extra Switch 2 time when they shouldn’t be.

You can limit the battery charging level

A new system-level option will prevent the Switch 2 from charging as soon as it hits 90 percent of capacity, a move intended to increase the longevity of the internal battery. This is already a common feature on many smartphones and portable gaming devices, so it’s nice to see Nintendo joining the bandwagon here. Thus far, though, it appears that the 90 percent battery capacity is the only cutoff point available, with no further options for customization.

You can adjust the size of menu text

MAXIMUM TEXT SIZE.

Credit: Kyle Orland

MAXIMUM TEXT SIZE. Credit: Kyle Orland

As you can see in the photo above, setting the system text size to “MAXIMUM” lets menu options be seen easily from roughly the moon. You can set the system text to bold and high-contrast for even more legibility, and there’s also an option to make the system menu text smaller than the default, for whatever reason.

You can swap the A and B buttons at the system level

With this menu option activated, the B button is used to “confirm” and the A button is used to “cancel” in system menus. This should be welcome news for players more used to the button layout on Xbox, PlayStation, and Steam Deck controllers, which all have the “confirm” and “cancel” options in reversed positions from the Nintendo default.

Photo of Kyle Orland

Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.

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f1-in-spain:-now-that-was-a-lapse-in-judgment

F1 in Spain: Now that was a lapse in judgment

Cars, F1, Formula 1, Spanish Grand Prix / /

Russell was next, at turn 1, giving Verstappen what looked like a dose of his own medicine. The Red Bull was forced to use the escape road and maintained his position before being told by his team to give the place back. Already on the back foot, this was too much, he told his race engineer. “But that’s the rules,” replied the laconic Gianpiero Lambiase.

BARCELONA, SPAIN - MAY 31: Max Verstappen of the Netherlands and Oracle Red Bull Racing prepares to drive in the garage during qualifying ahead of the F1 Grand Prix of Spain at Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya on May 31, 2025 in Barcelona, Spain.

Verstappen was tight-lipped about the incident following the race but has since said it was “a move that was not right and shouldn’t have happened.” Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images

Verstappen slowed to let Russell through, then sped up into turn 4, opening up his steering and colliding with the Mercedes. Call it petulance or frustration; it was an inexcusable lapse of judgment from a driver. Using one’s car as a weapon against another competitor on track is unacceptable, and the 10-second penalty that Verstappen earned as a result dropped him to 10th place at the end, ruining his own race more than anyone else’s.

We all have days we’re not proud of, when we don’t control our worst emotions. And I think that when he looks back on Sunday, it won’t be a Grand Prix that Max Verstappen is proud of.

The post-mortem would have been quite fast, as this year, the teams all have access to a new content delivery system from Globant that provides onboard video, audio, and some telemetry. That means you can really see both sides of an argument to get a little perspective, all through an iOS-like interface. On that note, the Globant team is keen to talk, so if you have any technical questions about how they provide all that data to the teams at the track, please drop them in the comments, and we’ll address them in a separate article.

Sadly, Verstappen is not the only multiple-time world champion to succumb to such behavior. Michael Schumacher, Ayrton Senna, and Sebastian Vettel have 14 championships between them, and each blotted their copybooks on more than one occasion. Don’t think it’s required to get to the top, though; I’ve never once seen Lewis Hamilton lose it like that, and it will be a while before anyone has as many wins as Sir Lewis.

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CDC updates COVID vaccine recommendations, but not how RFK Jr. wanted

CDC, centers for disease control and prevention, health, rfk jr, vaccines / /

In practice, it is unclear how this change will affect access to the vaccines. Health insurers are required to cover vaccines on the CDC schedules. But, it’s yet to be seen if children will only be able to get vaccinated at their doctor’s office (rather than a pharmacy or vaccine clinic) or if additional consent forms would be required, etc. Uncertainty about the changes and requirements alone may lead to fewer children getting vaccinated.

In the adult immunization schedule, when viewed “by medical condition or other indication” (table 2), the COVID-19 vaccination recommendation for pregnancy is now shaded gray, meaning “no guidance/not applicable.” Hovering a cursor over the box brings up the recommendation to “Delay vaccination until after pregnancy if vaccine is indicated.” Previously, COVID-19 vaccines were recommended during pregnancy. The change makes it less likely that health insurers will cover the cost of vaccination during pregnancy.

The change is at odds with Trump’s Food and Drug Administration, which just last week confirmed that pregnancy puts people at increased risk of severe COVID-19 and, therefore, vaccination is recommended. Medical experts have decried the loss of the recommendation, which is also at odds with clear data showing the risks of COVID-19 during pregnancy and the benefits of vaccination.

The President of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) put out a statement shortly after the Tuesday video, saying that the organization was “extremely disappointed” with Kennedy’s announcement.

“It is very clear that COVID-19 infection during pregnancy can be catastrophic and lead to major disability, and it can cause devastating consequences for families,” ACOG President Steven Fleischman said.

CDC updates COVID vaccine recommendations, but not how RFK Jr. wanted Read More »

letting-kids-be-kids

Letting Kids Be Kids

Letting / /

Letting kids be kids seems more and more important to me over time. Our safetyism and paranoia about children is catastrophic on way more levels than most people realize. I believe all these effects are very large:

  1. It raises the time, money and experiential costs of having children so much that many choose not to have children, or to have less children than they would want.

  2. It hurts the lived experience of children.

  3. It hurts children’s ability to grow and develop.

  4. It de facto forces children to use screens quite a lot.

  5. It instills a very harmful style of paranoia in all concerned.

This should be thought of as part of the Cost of Thriving Index discussion, and the fertility discussions as well. Before I return to the more general debate, I wanted to take care of this aspect first. It’s not that the economic data is lying exactly, it’s that it is missing key components. Economists don’t include these factors in their cost estimates and their measures of welfare. They need to do that.

I want a distinct marker for this part of the problem I can refer back to, thus this will include highlights of past discussions of the issue from older roundups and posts.

Why are so many people who are on paper historically wealthy, with median wages having gone up, saying they cannot afford children? A lot of it is exactly this. The real costs have gone up dramatically, largely in ways not measured directly in money, also in the resulting required basket of goods especially services, and this is a huge part of how that happened.

Bryan Caplan’s Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids focuses on the point that you can put in low effort on many fronts, and your kids will be fine. Scott Alexander recently reviewed it, to try and feel better about that, and did a bunch of further research. The problem is that even if you know being chill is fine, people have to let you be chill.

On Car Seats as Contraception is a great case study, but only a small part of the puzzle.

This is in addition to college admissions and the whole school treadmill, which is beyond the scope of this post.

We have the Housing Theory of Everything, which makes the necessary space more expensive, but not letting kids be kids – which also expands how much house you need for them, so the issues compound – is likely an even bigger issue here.

The good news is, at least when this type of thing happens it can still be news.

Remember, this is not ‘the kid was forcibly brought home and the mother was given a warning,’ which would be crazy enough. The mother was charged with ‘child neglect’ and was being held in jail on bond.

A civilization with that level of paranoia seems impossible to sustain.

WBOY 12News: A woman has been charged after a young child was found walking alone on the side of the road in Glenville.

Gov Deeply: > The child, who was described as being about 7 years old, told officers that he had walked from a residence on North Lewis Street to McDonald’s, which is more than a quarter mile.

> Fraley has been charged with child neglect. She is being held in Central Regional Jail on $5,000 bond.

If that’s the full story: ridiculous!

Make Childhood Great Again. Set our children free. (And punish cops & prosecutors who get in the way.)

I was curious so looked it up: we walked 0.7 miles to & from elementary school each day, sun or rain or snow. Half the stretch was a somewhat busy road.

Definitely starting in first grade; maybe Kindergarten. Not a big deal.

vbgyor: The charge should be for letting her child eat at McDonalds.

These objections can be absolute, in this next case at least they didn’t arrest anyone:

John McLaughin: My 9 year old son was brought home in back of a police car Monday. He went to Publix, literally 500 ft from our home, to buy a treat w/ his own money. He’d done this several times before. The officer at the store that day decided he was too young to shop alone. It was infuriating.

Luckily, they didn’t arrest me or my wife like they did the other lady in GA last year, but it was still infuriating. They did write a report and have an ambulance come out to check him. It was over the top and of course their basis for this was “endangerment.”

Yes, the store is familiar with him. We are regulars and he’s gone by himself on several occasions. He said after asking him why he was there and where his parents were, the officer said “I don’t want you here alone.”

Those are the most recent ones, here are some flashbacks (remember when I used italics?).

Childhood Roundup #1: Sane 2022 parents of 10-year-olds: I would like to let you go outside without me. I am terrified that someone will call the cops and they will take you away from me.

That is a thing now. As in parents being thrown in jail for letting their eight year old child walk home from school on their own.

As they stood on her porch, the officers told Wallace that her son could have been kidnapped and sex trafficked. “‘You don’t see much sex trafficking where you are, but where I patrol in downtown Waco, we do,'” said one of the cops, according to Wallace.

Did things get more dangerous since 1980, when we were mostly sane about this? No. They got vastly less dangerous, in all ways other than the risk of someone calling the cops.

The numbers on ‘sex trafficking’ and kidnapping by strangers are damn near zero.

The incident caused ‘ruin your life’ levels of damage.

Child services had the family agree to a safety plan, which meant Wallace and her husband could not be alone with their kids for even a second. Their mothers—the children’s grandmothers—had to visit and trade off overnight stays in order to guarantee the parents were constantly supervised. After two weeks, child services closed Wallace’s case, finding the complaint was unfounded.

…

Wallace’s sister has started a GoFundMe for her. She is in debt after losing her job and paying for the lawyer and the diversion program. She also hopes to hire a lawyer to get her record expunged so that she can work with kids again.

One of my closest friends here in New York is strongly considering moving to the middle of nowhere so that his child will be able to walk around outside, because it is not legally safe to do that anywhere there are people.

Update on that friend: They did indeed move out of New York for this reason, and then got into trouble for related issues when they were legally in the right, because that turns out not to matter much if the police decide otherwise.

Childhood Roundup #2: Here is another case study where parents were arrested for letting their children walk a few blocks on their own. In this case, the children were 6 and 8, and were walking to Dunkin Donuts in a quiet suburban neighborhood. Once again ‘sex offenders’ were used as the police justification. Once again, there was a child services investigation.

Woman who was arrested for letting 14-year-old babysit finally cleared of charges.

Neighbor writes in to the newspaper because they are concerned that a 13-year-old is left alone in their house on Saturdays, to ask if perhaps they should call child protective services about this? Yes, we are completely insane.

Childhood Roundup #7: Then recently we have the example where an 11-year-old (!) walked less than a mile into a 370-person town, and the mother was charged with reckless conduct and forced to sign a ‘safety plan’ on pain of jail time pledging to track him at all times via an app on his phone.

Billy Binion: I can’t get over this story. A local law enforcement agency is trying to force a mom to put a location tracker on her son—and if she doesn’t, they’re threatening to prosecute her. Because her kid walked less than a mile by himself. It’s almost too crazy to be real. And yet.

CR#7: Or here’s the purest version of the problem:

Lenore Skenazy: Sometimes some lady will call 911 when she sees a girl, 8, riding a bike. So it goes these days.

BUT the cops should be able to say, “Thanks, ma’am!”…and then DO NOTHING.

Instead, a cop stopped the kid, then went to her home to confront her parents.

Here is the traditional chart of how little we let our kids walk around these days:

Scott Alexander goes into detail about exactly how dangerous it is to be outside, but all you need to know is that not only is it not more dangerous today, it is dramatically safer now than it ever was… except for the danger of cops or CPS knocking at your door.

What we need continue to need are clear, hard rules for exactly what is and is not permitted, where if you are within the rules you are truly in the clear and if the police or others hassle you non-trivially there are consequences for the police and others.

Scott Alexander: I can’t reach Caplan’s specific source (Bianchi et al, Changing Rhythms Of American Family Life), but his claims broadly match the data in Dotti Sani & Treas (2016):

My wife eventually found Wilkie and Cullen (2023), an alternate data source which bins responses by child age.

Then from BLS:

Adults living in households with children under age 6 spent an average of 2.3 hours per day providing primary childcare to household children … primary childcare is childcare that is done as a main activity, such as providing physical care or reading to children. (See table 9.)

Adults living in households with at least one child under age 13 spent an average of 5.1 hours per day providing secondary childcare – that is, they had at least one child in their care while doing activities other than primary childcare. Secondary childcare provided by adults living in households with children under age 13 was most commonly provided while doing leisure activities (1.9 hours) or household activities (1.3 hours).

Even secondary care is a dramatic reduction in flexibility and productivity. And we’re talking about a total of 7.4 hours per day, with 19 hours on weekends between both parents. That’s full time jobs. Weekends are supposed to be break time, but often they’re not anymore.

If we assume that the BLS statistics Scott cites are accurate, and that the ratios in the first graph are also accurate, and that the trends are likely continuing and should be expected to continue getting worse, this is a nightmare amount of supervision time.

Some good news, Georgia passes the Reasonable Childhood Independence bill, so there are now 11 states with such laws: Florida, Georgia, Missouri, Utah, Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Montana, and Virginia.

This was triggered in part because Brittany Patterson was arrested for letting her 10 year old walk to a store, along with a few other similar cases.

The problem for parents like John McLaughin and Brittany Patterson is, random safetyists will still call the police, and when they do the police often simply ignore such laws, as my friend found out in Connecticut. Even when the conduct in question is explicitly legal, that often won’t save you from endless trouble, and if things get into the family courts you absolutely get punished if you try to point out you didn’t do anything wrong and are forced to genuflect and lie.

Ultimately, this all comes down to tail risk. You can’t do obviously correct fully sane things, if there’s even a tiny chance of the law coming in and causing massive headaches, or even ruining your life and that of your children.

The amount of paranoia about having your child taken away, or potentially (see above cases) the parent even being outright arrested, has reached ludicrous levels, mostly among exactly the people who you do not want worrying about this. Even a report that causes no action now can be a big worry down the line.

And the reports are very common. Consider that 37% of children are reported, at some point, to CPS, this is from my Childhood Roundup #3, which also has more CPS examples in it:

Jerusalem: This is… a wild stat. 37 percent of all US children are subjects of CPS reports (28% of white children and 53% of Black children experience CPS involvement before their 18th birthday).

Abigail: I had a neighbor threaten to call cps beccause I let my kid play in my fully fenced backyard while I watched from inside. She came over, banged on my door, threatened it in front of that kid. People these days call over nothing. Everyone’s scared of it. Moms talk about the fear a lot in my experience.

So what could we do about this?

Matt Bateman: Besides changing norms and laws around child safetyism, a good reform would be: make it trivial to appeal and correct reports.

There is a system of ghost convictions that happens by records—police reports, CPS referrals, medical records, school records—that ~cannot be fought.

Shin Megami Boson: CPS removes around 200k children from the care of their parents each year. most of those children are reunited with their parents after an investigation. about 350 kids are victims of non-family abductions a year.

By napkin math, CPS is responsible for over 99.6% of annual non-parental kidnappings in the US.

Because of semi-coercive “safety plans” this is potentially a substantial underestimate.

Actually I gave them a bit of the benefit of the doubt and assumed half of all investigated cases were real cases of abuse. their actual number of substantiated investigations is closer to 22%.

The Rich: CPS removes 200k from their parents??????????

every year?????

Ben Podgursky: there are a lot of really, really, really bad parents this is tough because parents should get the benefit of the doubt, but the sad fact is that the CPS abuse-of-power cases (which yes, are bad) are like 10%… it’s mostly kids in unbelievable neglect

Memetic Sisyphus: Before anyone gets upset by this number, go to your local mom’s Facebook group and look at the moms fighting with CPS.

Mr. Garvin: Every story about CPS is spun as “the government/hospital is kidnapping my baby for no reason” because of HIPAA Important details like “the baby was literally starving to death” or “the toddler ate a whole package of weed gummies that mom left out” can’t be publicly disclosed.

You would have no idea how common it is for CPS to come on the very day the parents were about to go out and buy their kids a bed or set of diapers.

It seems like there is a very easy, very clear way to distinguish between the horrible cases we’re talking about where children are lacking very basic needs or something truly horrible is happening, where CPS apparently often still has trouble making the removal stick, and cases of safetyism concerns since only 22% of cases are substantiated.

And yet here we are.

Hermit Yab: 10% of 200k is a lot I would not be OK losing my kids to some psycho social worker because 9 other shitheads were bad parents. Actually it would make me even angrier.

I mean, yeah, okay, fine, let’s say it’s 20k kids being kidnapped out of 75.2 million per year where there was nothing seriously wrong, often because of some other person’s safetyism paranoia followed by a capricious decision, and this is being used as essentially a terrorism campaign, and we’re down from 99.6% of kidnappings to 96%, with a lot of them basically justified by blaming the other 4%, despite most of the other 4% being from custodial disputes.

Still seems pretty not great, especially given what then happens to the kids.

Wayne: The counterpoint to my position on CPS is that maybe we should be happy to see people on the side of victims, for once, and perhaps should want to see more of that, not less.

The problem with this, though, is that there’s no magical place to put kids who live with parents who are just kind of shitty. Nobody is dying to raise those kids. They go into foster care, where rates of abuse and neglect are even higher.

I suppose one silver lining is that if you have a backup place for them in an emergency it’s a lot less bad? But still horribly bad.

Mason: It gives me some comfort to know that if our kids were ever removed by CPS there would be multiple close relatives we trust clamoring to take them on literally zero notice.

That so many of these kids have nobody like this, not one loving soul, is emblematic of a greater failing.

When I was very little my mom was accused of inviting men over to sexually abuse me, by a mentally ill babysitter she had fired.

Obviously traumatic for all of us, but what do you do, not investigate that? I was never put in foster care, there was family. Small blessings.

Consider the discussion Scott Alexander has in his review of Bryan Caplan’s Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids.

You want to tell your kids, go out and play, be home by dinner, like your father and his father before him. But if you do, or even if you tell your kids to walk the two blocks to school, eventually a policeman will show up at your house and warn you not to do it again, or worse. And yes, you’ll be the right legally, but what are you going to do, risk a long and expensive legal fight? So here we are, and either you supervise your kids all the time or say hello to a lot of screens.

It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

Lenore Skenazy: TOTAL CONTROL OF CHILDHOOD

Parents Mag’s “Top Pick” for a kid’s “1st Phone” lets parents “monitor all incoming & outgoing text messages…track location & GET ALERTS ANY TIME THEIR CHILD LEAVES A SPECIFIED LOCATION ZONE.”

My First Ankle Monitor!

Parents Magazine: The parental controls available through Pixel’s Caregiver Portal are particularly impressive. They allow parents to approve contacts and app downloads, monitor all incoming and outgoing text messages (including images), track their child’s location, and get alerts any time their child leaves a specified location zone.

“I really liked that feature and that strangers can’t contact my kids, even their friends, unless I approve them.” —Jessica, mom of four

That’s unfortunately what parents want these days, partly for fear of law enforcement. And as this post documents, that fear of law enforcement is highly reasonable.

In situations like this, it is not obvious in which direction various powers go.

The powers can be used for good, even from a freedom perspective, in several important ways.

  1. If you can track location, and especially if you get alerted when they stray, then you can give the child much wider freedom of movement, knowing they cannot get meaningfully lost, and without worrying that something happened to them or that you’ll never know where they went.

  2. Your ability to track location is a defense against law enforcement, or against other paranoid adults.

The other abilities are similarly double edged swords, and of course you don’t have to use your powers if you do not want them. The tricky one is monitoring messages, since you will be very tempted to use it, the kid will know this, and this means they don’t have a safe space, and also you know they can just make a phone call. I don’t love this part.

I can see saying you want to only monitor images, since that’s a lot of the potential threat model and relatively less of what needs to be private.

An actually good version is likely to use AI here. An AI should be able to detect inappropriate images, and if desired flag potentially scary text interactions, and only alert the parents if something is seriously wrong, without otherwise destroying privacy. That’s what I would want here.

I actively think it’s good to require approval on app downloads and contacts (and to then only let them message and call contacts), at whatever time you think they’re first ready for a phone – there’s clearly a window where you wouldn’t otherwise want them to have a phone, and this makes it workable. Later of course you will want to no longer have such powers.

New York City continues to close playgrounds on the slightest provocation, in this case an ‘icy conditions’ justification when it was 45 degrees out. Liz Wolfe calls this NYC ‘hating its child population.’ And that they tried to fine her when she tried to open a padlocked playground via hopping the fence.

I wouldn’t go that far, and I presume fear of lawsuits is playing a big part in these decisions. There has to be a way to deal with that. The obvious solution is to pass laws allowing the city to have a ‘at your own risk’ sign when conditions are questionable, but the courts have a nasty habit of not letting that kind of thing work – we really should do whatever it takes to fix that, however far up the chain that requires.

And that emphasizes that hopefully correct legal strategy is to padlock the playground, if legally necessary, and then if the parents evade that, you let them? Alternatively, the city hadn’t gotten around to reopening the playground yet, which obviously is a pretty terrible failure to prioritize – the value lost is very high and you still have to reopen it later. And it’s all the more reason to look the other way.

Liz notes that NYC’s under 5 population has fallen 18% since April 2020. I still think NYC is actually a pretty great place to raise kids if you can afford to do it, and I haven’t found the playgrounds to be closed that often when you actually want them to be open, but I certainly understand why people decide to leave.

Thread where Emmett Shear asks how our insane levels of safetyism and not letting kids exist without supervision could have so quickly come to pass.

Rowan: I found out yesterday that one of my coworkers was briefly separated from their parents as a child by CPS because a neighbor found out he was walking two blocks to school every day

Tetraspace: this is the kind of egregious thing that right-wing tetratopians really emphasise on their anti-earth propaganda. But the propaganda is, like, really well cited.

The safety arms race is related to and overlaps with the time investment arms race.

Cartoons Hate Her: I think there’s a parental safety arms race happening where a fringe group decides something is super dangerous, slightly less crazy people are convinced, and within 5 years so few people are doing it that people call the cops on you for it.

I am probably one of the crazy people btw. But I’m self aware!

Like at some point we will be in a place where parents are having CPS called on them for letting their kid sleep at a friend’s house.

This already happened with letting your kids walk to school btw

Even if you pass a ‘free range child’ or similar law requiring sanity, that largely doesn’t even do it, unless the police would actually respect that law when someone complains. Based on the anecdata I have, the police will frequently ignore that what you are doing is legal, and turn your situation into a nightmare anyway. And here’s Scott Alexander with another example beyond what I was referring to above:

Scott Alexander: I live next to a rationalist group house with several kids. They tried letting their six-year old walk two blocks home from school in the afternoon. After a few weeks of this, a police officer picked up the kid, brought her home, and warned the parents not to do this.

The police officer was legally in the wrong. This California child abuse lawyer says that there are no laws against letting your kid play (or walk) outside unsupervised. There is a generic law saying children generally need “adequate” supervision, but he doesn’t think the courts would interpret this as banning the sort of thing my friends did.

Still, being technically correct is cold comfort when the police disagree.

Even if you can eventually win a court case, that takes a lot of resources – and who’s to say a different cop won’t nab you next time? To solve the problem, seven states (not including California) have passed “reasonable childhood independence” laws, which make it clear to policemen and everyone else that unsupervised play is okay. There is a whole “free range kids” movement (its founder, Lenore Skenazy, gets profiled in SRTHMK) trying to win this legal and cultural battle.

Exactly. Scott’s proposed intervention of providing evidence of the law is fun to think about, and the experiment is worth running, but seems unlikely to work in practice.

The time investment arms race is totally nuts, father time spent is massively up too.

Again from Roundup #3:

RFH: The amount of time women are spending with children today is historically unprecedented and making both women and children insane.

Working moms today spend more time on childcare than housewives did in the 50s and no one seems to think that this is a serious problem and likely contributing to women no longer wanting to be moms, the workload and the pressure of motherhood has gotten out of control.

Zvi: If this was because the extra time brought joy, that would make sense. It isn’t (paper), at least not the extra time that happens when the mother is college-educated.

They can handle a lot more than people think, remarkably often.

Not all 12 year olds, and all that, but yes. This is The Way, all around. Don’t simply not arrest the parents if the kids walk to the store, also let the kids do actual real things.

In You Endohs: Just overheard a father explaining that it’s better to start a casino than a restaurant given the stronger revenue model—but that casinos are harder to set up from a regulatory perspective—to his FIVE YEAR OLD SON.

Emma Steuer: This is literally why I know everything about everything. Starting from infancy my dad would just talk to me like a regular person. I’m pretty sure I know everything he knows at this point

In You Endohs: Oh it rocks.

Henrik Karlsson: I’ve never understood why not everybody talks to kids this way, they love it.

I’ve seen exceptions, yeah. But they are quite rare ime.

When I worked at the art gallery, we had a 19-yr-old do an internship with us, which my boss handled, and I brought along a 12-yr-old as my intern. My boss put the 19-yr-old in the café and complained it was so hard to deal with kids. I taught the 12-yr-old to do our accounting.

I literally can’t understand why ppl behave so weirdly around kids. They are just slightly smaller humans. They like to be useful, they understand things well if you just explain it with enough context. They are fun to have around when you work.

Adam: I could teach a 13 year old to be a capable CAD architectural draftsman. Probably be a project manager by 18.

I mean, yeah, don’t start a restaurant, that never works out. Kids need to know.

Most of all:

Because that’s what they are. People. Some people take this too far. Only treat kids as peers in situations where that makes sense for that situation and that kid, but large parts of our society have gone completely bonkers in the other direction. For example:

Nicolas Decker: I’m ngl I find this sort of thing disgusting. God forbid someone treat a minor like a human being.

[This is from MIT of all places].

Kelsey Piper: I also worry that if you tell all adults with good intentions to absolutely never treat teenagers as peers, then the only people who are willing to treat them like peers are those with sketchy intentions.

Teenagers have a very strong desire to be intellectually respected and treated as peers and “no, never do that, because they value it so highly they can be vulnerable to adults who offer it” strikes me as the wrong way to respond

Sarah Constantin: yeesh this is from MIT?

Sufficiently talented minors *areadults’ peers at intellectual work. they deserve to be real collaborators! Starting to think it’s a red flag for…something when adults repress any identification with “what I would have wanted when I was a kid/teen.”

I have heard enough different stories about MIT letting us down exactly in places where you’d think ‘come on it’s MIT’ that I worry it’s no longer MIT. The more central point is that peers are super great, confidants are great, and this is yet another example of taking away the superior free version and forcing us to pay for a formalized terrible shadow of the same thing.

How do we more generally enable people to have kids without their lives having to revolve around those kids? How do we lower the de facto obligations for absurd amounts of personalized attention for them?

The obvious first thing is that we used to normalize kids being in various places, and how if you take your kids to almost anything people at best look at you like you’re crazy. We need to find a way to have them stop doing that, or to not care.

Salad Bar Fan: Comment I saw on Reddit that caught my attention. I recall reading a post by Scott Sumner echoing the same sentiment of there being less mixing of adults and kids in his childhood with each operating in their own little world apart from one another.

Pamela Hobart: Things revolving around the kids seemed to happen almost automatically by the time we had 3 under age 4.

I’ve never done things like cook separate meals or refuse hiring a babysitter to go out w/o kids. But just bringing them along to whatever the adults want to do is really hard and not always acceptable to others. What specifically made this attitude easier in the past? Just that there were so many more kids?

Like a few weeks ago I had to bring my 7 and 5yos to the tax office to renew an auto registration, it was midday on a Wednesday. They were home on break from private school i.e. not the spring break most families had.

Bunch of old folks in there glaring at me like they’d never seen a kid before?

The thing is this also relies upon the children being able to handle it. My understanding is that we used to focus less attention on children, and also to enforce behavior codes on them that were there to benefit adults rather than the children, and got them used to being bored and having nothing to do, and also they got used to being able to play on their own.

While I don’t fully want to go back to that amount of boredom, I do think that it would be a fair and net worthwhile trade to have kids accept far more ‘bored time,’ or ‘here at an adult event they don’t fully understand and have to behave time,’ and to normalize that as good and right. We used to be willing to trade really a ton of kid bored time to save adult time, now we do the opposite. We need middle ground.

Phones in schools is beyond the scope of today’s post, but overall screen time is not. Screen time is one of the few ways to reduce the time burden on caregivers.

It’s another day, and the same screens moral panic we’ve been having for a long time?

Roon: Another day, another moral panic.

Sebastiaan de With: This shit is evil. Plain and simple. I feel like we’ve crossed a point where we have stopped calling out others doing work that’s simply a huge harm to mankind and it’s time for that to change.

Felix (quoting): It’s audience research day at Moonbug Entertainment, the London company that produces 29 of the most popular online kids’ shows in the world, found on more than 150 platforms in 32 languages and with 7.8 billion views on YouTube in March alone. Once a month, children are brought here, one at a time, and shown a handful of episodes to figure out exactly which parts of the shows are engaging and which are tuned out.

For anyone older than 2 years old, the team deploys a whimsically named tool: the Distractatron.

It’s a small TV screen, placed a few feet from the larger one, that plays a continuous loop of banal, real-world scenes — a guy pouring a cup of coffee, someone getting a haircut — each lasting about 20 seconds. Whenever a youngster looks away from the Moonbug show to glimpse the Distractatron, a note is jotted down.

We have had a moral panic about screens in one form or another since we had screens, as in television.

I reiterate, once again, that this panic was and is essentially correct. The TV paranoia was correct, it brought great advantages but the warnings of idiot box, ‘couch potato’ and ‘boob tube,’ and crowding out other activities and so on were very much not wrong.

Modern screens have even huger downsides and dangers, and most of what is served to our kids is utter junk optimized against them, which is what they will mostly choose if left alone to do so.

Even when you are careful about what they watch, and it is educational and reasonable, there are still some rather nasty addictive behaviors to watch out for.

One can imagine ‘good’ versions of all this tech, but right now it doesn’t exist. It seems crazy that it doesn’t exist? Shouldn’t someone sell it? Properly curated experiences that gave parents proper control and steered children in good ways seem super doable, and would have a very large market with high willingness to pay. The business model is different, but also kind of obvious?

Is it going to be fine the way it is? Yeah, sure, for some value of ‘fine.’ And with AI I’m actually net optimistic things will mostly get better on this particular front. But yeah, Cocomelon is freaking scary, a lot of YouTube is far worse than that, giving children access to tablets and phones early will reliably get them addicted and cause big issues, and pretending otherwise is folly.

Discussion about this post

Letting Kids Be Kids Read More »

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Court blocks Trump’s retaliatory tariffs, amplifying trade war chaos

Donald Trump, Policy, tariffs, trade war / /

Trump quickly appeals

Trump has immediately appealed the ruling and is expected to take the case to the Supreme Court. He’s arguing that the court cannot define what constitutes a “national emergency,” which is a political question he believes only Congress can address.

White House spokesperson Kush Desai has made it clear that Trump remains “committed to using every lever of executive power to address” the “crisis” of trade deficits, CNN reported, which he claimed have “decimated American communities, left our workers behind, and weakened our defense industrial base.”

But the three-judge panel has already indicated that Trump may be focusing on the wrong question in seeking to further his case, noting that the “question here is not whether something should be done; it is who has the authority to do it.” According to the court, Trump does not.

Americans celebrate Trump loss

Ultimately, the judges agreed with US plaintiffs who alleged that tariffs risked vast harms to Americans, including spiking prices on their goods. Earlier this month, the Consumer Technology Association forecasted that Americans could pay more than $123 billion more annually for just 10 common gadgets hit with tariffs.

Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield, among other state enforcers who are suing, issued a statement criticizing Trump’s previously “unchecked authority” that he said threatened to “upend the economy” and celebrating the win for “working families, small businesses, and everyday Americans.”

“President Trump’s sweeping tariffs were unlawful, reckless, and economically devastating,” Rayfield said. “They triggered retaliatory measures, inflated prices on essential goods, and placed an unfair burden on American families, small businesses and manufacturers.”

Problems with sourcing and pricing were decreasing orders even to American businesses, suing US firms said, and for many, the sudden spike in costs at the border caused “a large, immediate, strain” on cash flow. At least one plaintiff alleged they could go out of business and be unable to pay employees without an injunction soon. One cycling store feared tariffs might cost it about $250,000 by the end of 2025.

Court blocks Trump’s retaliatory tariffs, amplifying trade war chaos Read More »

rfk-jr.-yanks-pandemic-vaccine-funding-as-moderna-reports-positive-results

RFK Jr. yanks pandemic vaccine funding as Moderna reports positive results

health, influenza, pandemic / /

The Department of Health and Human Services—under the control of anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—has canceled millions of dollars in federal funding awarded to Moderna to produce an mRNA vaccine against influenza viruses with pandemic potential, including the H5N1 bird flu currently sweeping US poultry and dairy cows.

Last July, the Biden administration’s HHS awarded Moderna $176 million to “accelerate the development of mRNA-based pandemic influenza vaccines.” In the administration’s final days in January, HHS awarded the vaccine maker an additional $590 million to support “late-stage development and licensure of pre-pandemic mRNA-based vaccines.” The funding would also go to the development of five additional subtypes of pandemic influenza.

On Wednesday, as news broke that the Trump administration was reneging on the contract, Moderna reported positive results from an early trial of a vaccine targeting H5 influenza viruses. In a preliminary trial of 300 healthy adults, the vaccine candidate appeared safe and boosted antibody levels against the virus by 44.5-fold.

An HHS spokesperson said that the decision to cancel the funding—which would support thorough safety and efficacy testing of the vaccines—was because the vaccines needed more testing.

“This is not simply about efficacy—it’s about safety, integrity, and trust.” HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon told The Washington Post. “The reality is that mRNA technology remains under-tested.”

Nixon went on to claim that the Trump administration wouldn’t repeat the “mistakes of the last administration, which concealed legitimate safety concerns.” The accusation refers to mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines, which were developed and initially released under the first Trump administration. They have since been proven safe and effective against the deadly virus.

RFK Jr. yanks pandemic vaccine funding as Moderna reports positive results Read More »

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Healthy man goes camping—lands in ICU for 40 days with respiratory failure

hantavirus, health, infectious diseases, medical case, respiratory failure / /

It was a diagnostic challenge, and doctors began reviewing the list of possibilities that could match his condition. The first guess of pneumonia could explain some of his respiratory findings, but he didn’t have a cough, had tested negative for common respiratory pathogens, and the lung imaging didn’t quite fit, making it seem unlikely. Blood cancers, such as polycythemia vera, might be able to explain the high concentrations of blood cells. And it might also make him more vulnerable to opportunistic lung infections, like a fungal infection that could explain the halo sign. But blood cancers were also deemed unlikely given that he didn’t have enlarged organs, which is often seen with such conditions. Another possibility was pulmonary–renal syndrome, but that also didn’t line up with the man’s case.

Diagnosis

There was one other possibility that seemed to tick all the boxes: fever, gastrointestinal symptoms, low oxygen saturation, pulmonary edema, and shock—a hantavirus infection.

Hantaviruses are RNA viruses that infect rodents worldwide. They typically cause asymptomatic, chronic infections in the animals, which spread the virus widely into their environments through their urine, feces, and saliva. Humans get infected when virus particles from rodent-contaminated areas are stirred up into the air and inhaled or through direct contact with the virus via the eyes, nose, mouth, or cuts.

In humans, the viral infection is anything but asymptomatic. While the disease mechanism isn’t entirely understood, the virus appears to be able to modulate immune responses in humans, causing blood vessels and capillaries in various places in the body to start leaking plasma. This leads to fluid building up in the lungs (the pulmonary edema) and systemic circulatory collapse.

A cardiopulmonary hantavirus infection typically has four stages: the incubation period, which can last up to 45 days after virus exposure; a prodromal phase of up to 12 days, which is marked by fever, fatigue, and pains; the cardiopulmonary phase, where breathing trouble, low oxygen saturation, and shock can develop; then, if you make it, the fourth stage, in which respiratory symptoms improve, but there’s lingering fatigue and the kidneys make abnormally large amounts of urine.

Healthy man goes camping—lands in ICU for 40 days with respiratory failure Read More »

amazon-and-stellantis-abandon-project-to-create-a-digital-“smartcockpit”

Amazon and Stellantis abandon project to create a digital “SmartCockpit”

Amazon, Cars, Stellantis / /

Automaker Stellantis and retail and web services behemoth Amazon have decided to put an end to a collaboration on new in-car software. The partnership dates back to 2022, part of a wide-ranging agreement that also saw Stellantis pick Amazon Web Services as its cloud platform for new vehicles and Amazon sign on as the first customer for Ram’s fully electric ProMaster EV van.

A key aspect of the Amazon-Stellantis partnership was to be a software platform for new Stellantis vehicles called STLA SmartCockpit. Meant to debut last year, SmartCockpit was supposed to “seamlessly integrate with customers’ digital lives to create personalized, intuitive in-vehicle experiences,” using Alexa and other AI agents to provide better in-car entertainment but also navigation, vehicle maintenance, and in-car payments as well.

But 2024 came and went without the launch of SmartCockpit, and now the joint work has wound down, according to Reuters, although not for any particular reason the news organization could discern. Rather, the companies said in a statement that they “will allow each team to focus on solutions that provide value to our shared customers and better align with our evolving strategies.”

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Fun With Veo 3 and Media Generation

Media / /

Since Claude 4 Opus things have been refreshingly quiet. Video break!

First up we have Prompt Theory, made with Veo 3, which I am considering the first legitimately good AI-generated video I’ve seen. It perfectly combining form and function. Makes you think.

Here’s a variant, to up the stakes a bit, then here is him doing that again.

What does it say about the medium, or about us, that these are the first legit videos?

This was the second clearly good product. Once again, we see a new form of storytelling emerging, a way to make the most of a series of clips that last a maximum of eight seconds each. The script and execution are fantastic.

I predict that will be the key for making AI videos at the current tech level. You have to have a great script and embrace the style of storytelling that AI can do well. It will be like the new TikTok, except with a higher barrier to entry. At this level, it is fantastic for creatives and creators.

Or you can do this (thread has a bunch more):

Tetraspace: finally we made the most beautiful woman in the world saying I love you from the famous QC short story Don’t Do That.

Sound is a game changer, and within an eight second clip I think we’re definitely ‘there’ with Veo 3 except for having more fine control and editing tools. What we don’t see yet is anyone extending the eight second clips into sixteen second clips (and then more by induction), but it feels like we’re only a few months away from that being viable and then the sky’s the limit.

Is Veo 3 too expensive for ‘personal fun’ uses?

Near Cyan: veo3 is far too pricey to use just for personal fun all the time, so the primary high-volume use case will be for bulk youtube shorts monetization. this is the first time (i think?) an sota genai model provider also owns the resulting distribution of much of what users will make.

For now, basically yes, once you run through your free credits. It’s $21 marginal cost per minute of silent video or $45 with sound, and any given generation might not be what you want. That’s not casual use territory. If you can produce a good two-hour movie for $10k (let’s say you get to use about half the footage?) then that’s obviously great, but yeah you gotta be going for real distribution here.

I predict that sometime soon, someone will make a good Veo 3 rules video, about the existential situation of the actors involved being AI, where the twist is that the video was made by human actors. I also predict that the cost of making this video will be, shall we say, not small in relative terms.

Hasan Can: $0.17 per image for OpenAI’s GPT Image 1 model is insanely expensive. How are developers supposed to use this at scale without going broke? OpenAI seriously needs to cut costs and optimize this model. In its current form, it’s just not viable for indie developers.

Rijn Hartman: INSANELY expensive – I tried building on it and while testing alone is costed $15. Not worth.

Insanely expensive? My lord is this ‘everything is amazing and nobody’s happy.’ You’re getting a complete artistic image for $0.17. Can you imagine you can commission art to your specifications for $0.17? Hot damn. Compare that to the previous options for an indie (game) developer. I get that you might want to use a different option now that’s cheaper, or that you might want to disable your users from using it if you can’t charge. And of course who is to say the images are any good. But we have a huge bug in our understanding of value.

Seb Krier predicts that as AI offers a low cost alternative way to create content, we will see a further bifurcation into high culture versus low culture, between art made to scale in the market and make big bucks, and art made for self-satisfaction and novelty-driven reasons, and both will improve in quality. I’d add we also should see a third category of highly personalized content that can’t scale at all, which seems distinct in many ways from artisan production, and also a split between ‘embrace AI’ versus ‘make a point of in many or all ways avoiding AI.’

Seb thinks all this is good, actually. I think it could be, but I’m highly unsure.

We should beware the further shattering of the cultural commons, for many reasons, and also a lack of sufficient incentives to drive creatives, even if their costs are down. And a lot of this will depend on our ability to use AI or rely on others to do selection. That seems like a highly solvable problem, and we’ve made great strides in solving it for some areas but we still struggle a lot, especially with the inability to make the selection mechanism be maximizing user experience rather than work for a platform.

Another big issue Gwern raises is that ‘bad money crowds out good’ is totally a thing.

Gwen: The higher-order effects here are going to be a problem. You could run the same argument about LLMs: “if you don’t like ChatGPTese creative writing, you don’t have to read it; therefore, everyone is strictly better off for it.”

In the current landscape, does that seem true?

(You might defend it on net, but there are obviously lots of places where things have gotten worse, and there are compounding effects: what is the long run effect on creative writing of all the young people learning to write like ChatGPT, rather than themselves?)

I think we are definitely better off at least for now on both video and text, but yeah there isn’t going to be any getting around it, especially for people who scroll TikTok or Instagram, unless we get good widely distributed AI filtering.

Seb Krier: Yes I don’t think it will be without cost for sure. I think we’re still in the early days and I imagine we’ll come up with more tools, UIs, customisation options, finetuned models, ways of teaching writing, and other tricks that could help incentivise diversity. Some degree of homogenisation is likely but I’m not sure it’s permanent or the only way things go.

Even today I’m finding it boring and bland when I read ChatGPTese and it turns me off from the rest of the text (sometimes). I assume many will feel that way and that might incentivise different styles, particularly in domains where individuality matters.

But it’s true that you might get a lot of slop music and slop art; for those who don’t want it I assume we’ll also get better at developing curation tools and communities. Today even if one doesn’t like Spotify recs, there are so many ways of accessing more interesting music!

Yes, this is true, you can work around Spotify recs being bad, but in practice it is so so much better if the recs that are natural and easy to access are good. Netflix illustrates this even more clearly, yes you can in theory do a search for anything you want, but who will do that? How they organize your list and recommendations determines (I think?) most of what most people watch.

Until Veo 3, nothing anyone made with AI video was interesting to me as more than a curiosity. Now, we have a few good meta things. Soon, it’s going beyond that.

Also, in sort of related news, here’s a funny thing that happened this week:

Anthropic’s Long Term Benefits Trust appoints Reed Hastings, chairman and cofounder of Netflix, to Anthropic’s board. That’s certainly a heavy hitter, he clearly does worry about AI and has written a $50 million check to prove it. The only worry is that his concerns could be too focused on the mundane.

Also I’d love to see a Netflix-Anthropic partnership, Claude giving me my Netflix recommendations and having full access to their catalogue with subscription when?

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Threat of Meta breakup looms as FTC’s monopoly trial ends

Antitrust law, facebook, federal trade commission, Instagram, Meta, meta monopoly trial, monopoly, Policy, whatsapp / /

“Meta is a proud American success story, and we look forward to continuing to innovate and serve the people and businesses who love our services,” Meta’s spokesperson said.

Experts aren’t so sure Meta has clinched it

Boasberg has said that the key question he must answer is whether the FTC’s market definition is too narrow.

Arguing against the market definition, Meta has said that connecting friends and family isn’t even Meta apps’ “core use” anymore, as an evolving competitive social media landscape has forced Meta to turn its newsfeeds into discovery engines to rival TikTok. Justin Teresi, an antitrust analyst, told Bloomberg that because the FTC failed to show that users primarily come to Meta apps to connect with friends and family, it may have strengthened Meta’s case.

Rebecca Allensworth, a Vanderbilt law professor and antitrust expert, told Bloomberg that the “FTC’s narrowly defined market was always the weakest part of its case,” but the government “has done a nice job of minimizing that weakness” by showing that apps that don’t connect friends and family aren’t adequate substitutes for Meta’s apps.

“This was evident when Meta saw spikes in usage on holidays,” Allensworth suggested, which is perhaps “a sign people were turning to its products to connect with loved ones.”

Teresi thinks Meta has a 60 percent shot at winning the trial, although he criticized Meta’s seeming defense that any company competing for online ad dollars competes with Meta. That argument may have broadened the market definition too much, he suggested.

“If you’re saying that the relevant market here is competing for advertising dollars, then you could throw anything in there,” Teresi said. “You could throw TV in there, you could throw print in there if you wanted to, and there’s really no end to that concept.”

Allensworth was less confident in Meta’s chances, telling Bloomberg, “I really actually think this could go either way.”

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Falcon 9 sonic booms can feel more like seismic waves

acoustics, falcon 9, Physics, rocket launches, Science, sonic booms / /

Could the similarities confuse California residents who might mistake a sonic boom for an earthquake?  Perhaps, at least until residents learn otherwise. “Since we’re often setting up in people’s backyard, they text us the results of what they heard,” said Gee. “It’s fantastic citizen science. They’ll tell us the difference is that the walls shake but the floors don’t. They’re starting to be able to tell the difference between an earthquake or a sonic boom from a launch.”

Launch trajectories of Falcon 9 rockets along the California coast. Credit: Kent Gee

A rocket’s trajectory also plays an important role. “Everyone sees the same thing, but what you hear depends on where you’re at and the rocket’s path or trajectory,” said Gee, adding that even the same flight path can nonetheless produce markedly different noise levels. “There’s a focal region in Ventura, Oxnard, and Camarillo where the booms are more impactful,” he said. “Where that focus occurs changes from launch to launch, even for the same trajectory.” That points to meteorology also being a factor: certain times of year could potentially have more impact than others as weather conditions shift, with wind shears, temperature gradients, and topography, for instance, potentially affecting the propagation of sonic booms.

In short, “If you can change your trajectory even a little under the right meteorological conditions, you can have a big impact on the sonic booms in this region of the country,” said Gee. And it’s only the beginning of the project; the team is still gathering data. “No two launches look the same right now,” said Gee. “It’s like trying to catch lightning.”

As our understanding improves, he sees the conversation shifting to more subjective social questions, possibly leading to the development of science-based local regulations, such as noise ordinances, to address any negative launch impacts. The next step is to model sonic booms under different weather conditions, which will be challenging due to coastal California’s microclimates. “If you’ve ever driven along the California coast, the weather changes dramatically,” said Gee. “You go from complete fog at Vandenburg to complete sun in Ventura County just 60 miles from the base.”

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